


This is Love in the Modern Day, the Modern Way

by Kittycattycat



Category: Homestuck, Paradox Space (Webcomic)
Genre: Blood, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Casteism | Hemophobia (Homestuck), Childhood Friends, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Friends to Enemies to Casual Acquaintances, Friendship, Gen, Gore, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lusii, Major Character Injury, Manipulation, Mental Breakdown, One-Sided Attraction, One-Sided Redrom Feelings, One-Sides Pale Feelings, POV Second Person, Self-Harm, Unrequited Crush, Vrisky Business
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 20:51:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19838290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittycattycat/pseuds/Kittycattycat
Summary: Explosions are uncommon noises in this part of the highblood neighborhoods.





	This is Love in the Modern Day, the Modern Way

Your name is Equius Zahhak, and you're only one sweep old when you and your wonderful lusus are put into what is to be your permanent residence on Alternia, a grand mansion of a hive, standing tall and proud atop a large and craggy rock tower. Yes, a magnificent home made of room after infinitely spacious room entirely of your own adolescent design. They considered it to be so good that they did everything just perfectly, right down to the very last detail of what you wanted. 

You would not learn until much later that the color and therefore, the NOBILITY of your blood is what truly made it so that your vision was manufactured by the drones so precisely. However, this discovery would not, in any sense of the term, put a dent in your creativity. You would continue on as always, of course, because that is what highbloods do. What BLUEBLOODS do.

Still, this does not stop you-in-the-present-moment from becoming very, very pleased with yourself and your amazing design concepts as you run down each and every one of the hallways and swing open all the doors, ripping a few off their hinges before you can control your strength. You see computers and other sorts of wired electronics all across your hive in various places, and you're excited to check those out of course, but the physical hive itself comes first!

You also run quickly to your lusus a large and swooping hug, but stop just before coming into contact with him because you remember very vaguely the nice jadeblood ladies being concerned with the precarious cracking sounds that came from what you presumed to be his bones last time you had done it. You give him a simple pat on the head instead. It leaves a dark and somewhat painful-looking mark when you do, but Aurthour does not seem to be upset by this. Rather, he seems quite proud.

-

Your claws are growing in.

You've always had the claws, duh, but now they're getting even LONGER and POINTIER and if you make a fist hard enough the naturally yellow-colored nails dig really hard into your palm and sometimes make sharp little dots of indigo-tinted blood rise up from underneath your skin. It doesn't hurt at all, and everything heals right up in seconds. Still, Aurthour doesn't like it when you do this, so you try not to when you remember.

Many of your phasing teeth are still pushing their way in at an extraordinarily fast pace as well and, in only about two wipes, you've completely lost the old set of wiggler teeth and gained this new set in its entirety. They are much sharper than the set before, and considerably larger as well. They fill your mouth like razor blades and are so very perfect for shredding apart foods and enemies alike. (You have sliced open your own tongue accidentally more times than you can possibly count, but the wound heals just as fast as it was created, so it really is of no issue.) You cannot wait until you mature and grow in your final, adult set of teeth after second pupation. You'll get to be even MORE threatening!

You practice wide, jaggedly-toothed grins and broad, sweeping swipe motions and semi-serious growl noises in front of the bathroom mirror for many hours.

-

Two days later the loud, thundering construction begins just across the way. You clamber up a stool and look outside of your window to see the drones hard at work again. This time though, they're working on a hive that isn't yours, one just a short ways away. Despite being ever-so-slightly closer to the ground, it's about as big as your own hive, maybe a little bit smaller, with a fairly large-ish building overlooking the cliff’s incredibly steep edge. When you shift your body to look more you notice the tall, spiraling tower being built on the other side, almost completely hidden by the main building from your vantage point. It looks pretty nice, you think, and you realize with a jolt that this person is basically going to be your neighbor for the next several sweeps. 

After an excitement-filled and primarily one-sided conversation with Aurthour, you decide then and there that once the hive is finished being built, you will go over and greet your new neighbor. 

-

By the time the next night has rolled around, the hive is built. You really don't even notice how Aurthour is staring nervously down at the canyon between you and your new neighbor’s respective homes until he nudges you slightly with one hoof and you look out the window right beside him and you don't see what the big deal is you mean what even oh WOW that's a big spider. It's bigger than your entire hive, and its apparently already spun a good many webs stringing between the cliff and the rock column your hive rests atop, some just below halfway up and some almost low enough to touch the ground. The lusus seems to be craning it's head down towards a particular spot on your neighbor’s cliff face. Whatever it's staring at is being blocked by it's absolutely gigantic body, and you decide that going down there to try and check it out wouldn't be the brightest idea you've ever had. You turn and say this to Aurthour, and he agrees somehow even faster than you'd expected. You take the long way around to your neighbor’s hive and very intentionally don't think about how hungry your neighbor’s spider lusus looked.

-

When you finally meet her, you realize that you have no idea what on Alternia you're doing. You've never made even a singular friend before, and something tells you trying to imitate the friendship initiation rights that you've seen on television might not be the best way to go about this.

You try to casually scan her for details that might give you a hint as to what you should talk about as she does the same to you in return, not looking in any way hesitant at this new foreign troll that suddenly appeared in front of her home. Her hair is long and rather matted in several places, but offering to brush it would be both very strange and also a blatant pale solicitation which is NOT what you are aiming for here. Her clothes are rather plain looking, a black shirt and blue jeans and a very oversized jacket with the sleeves covering her hands slightly. You notice her symbol, Scorpio, and are very pleased to find it in a blueish hue very close to your own, just one rung below. It makes sense, because of course another blueblood would be able to have such a nice house like hers! Her caste is definitely a good mental note to have, but not exactly a conversation starter.

She’s grinning somewhat, as if she's excited to see someone here, but she's also still staring at you with large, wide eyes in a way that for whatever reason makes you rather uncomfortable. Her eyes are, of course, a light grey color that matches yours. Neither of you are anywhere near old enough to have the iris caste-colorings of a grown troll yet. Someday, though.

You see that her glasses are quite big and keep almost sliding down her nose. Maybe you could invite her over and tighten them for her? You remember looking up how to do it on the internet after you got tired of your prescription sunglasses slipping down the bridge of your nose no matter how far or how forcefully you pushed them back up. You bet she'd like that!

Just as you're about to make a suggestion to that effect, her wide grin suddenly falls. Not into any sort of frown or angry expression, but more a look of contemplation. “Why are you so sweaty?” she asks after a moment with a tilt of her head.

“Huh?”

“You're really wet,” she says. She reaches out and pats her hand against your arm a few times (you tense instinctively, preparing for a hard hit or a scratch) and then shoves it roughly into your face, almost hitting you square in the nose. True to her word, her ashy grey hand is practically dripping with perspiration.

“…I assumed everyone was like that.”

She shakes her head strangely, almost wildly, like some sort of barkbeast, and many strands of her long hair fall into her eyes. “Nuh-uh, not me. I think you're just weird.”

You frown. “I'm not weird.”

“Yeah you are!” she argues back, an uncomfortably malicious look in her eyes that you hadn't seen before, “You're SUPER weird!”

You're not sure what to say to that.

“…It's okay though,” she shrugs, looking completely normal again out of nowhere. It almost jars you how suddenly she's able to change moods and tones and just about everything to do with herself. “I'm weird too.”

You cock an eyebrow at her, “You are?”

“Yeah!”

“What makes you weird?”

She slouches and puffs out her cheeks, clearly pouting. “I dunno! But everybody at the caverns said I was suuuuuuuuper weird.”

“Did they?” He pauses. “Maybe it's your eye,” he offers, and then winces. He's never made a friend before, but he's pretty sure you don't start off most friendships by insulting the other person. 

“No way!” she shoots back, and for a second you think you've really screwed this one up, “My eye is mega cool!” Her slouching stops, and she shoots up stock-straight with her hands on her hips, “I’VE got vision EIGHT-FOLD!”

“I've never heard of that before.”

“It's like, super mega cool x-ray vision! If I focus reeeeeeeeally hard on something, I can see through it!”

“Oh,” you say articulately, “that is rather cool.”

“Heck yeah!”

Instinctively, you smile at her getting so excited over something so simple. Your smile… really, it was a great grin filled with sharp teeth that in certain situations would definitely have struck fear into the heart of whatever troll or alien or various other evil-doer gazed upon it. In THIS situation, however, it apparently just made Vriska both grin in return and also gasp in jealousy. “No WAY, you've got ALL your phasing teeth?! Every single one of them?!”

“Yes!”

She stomps her foot but doesn't stop grinning, clearly not actually as upset as she's pretending to be, “No faaaaaaaair! I'm still missing two of mine, see?!” She hooks her finger into the corner of her mouth and pulls on it to reveal the gap where indeed, two teeth have yet to come in. You simply say ‘gross!’ in the stereotypical joking way that all adolescents do, and Vriska laughs so hard at your exaggerated expression that she doubles over, like it’s the funniest joke she's ever heard in her admittedly-rather-short-thus-far life. You ask her then, once you've both mostly calmed down from your twin fits of amusement, if she wants to come over to your hive. She agrees enthusiastically, and independently you both decide that it's a race to see who gets there first. You win, of course, and she calls cheats. You both share a laugh again together, and you never realize that her loss was caused by a brief, pausing look down at the gigantic wailing spider in the ravine.

-

You drift apart over time.

It was inevitable, of course, but it was something you never wanted to accept when you were in your younger sweeps. You never wanted to think about the fact that one day, she would likely outgrow you and the (non-violent, mostly non-dangerous) games you used to play together. You see now, though, that you two were always just too different to stick. Matters of blood color aside (though that was certainly a factor, at least on your end), your personalities clash harshly like metal against metal. She is an unstoppable force, and you are an immovable object, to put it all rather lightly.

After your brief sweep and a half of being close friends with lives entangled closely, even with you feeling something akin to paleness towards her at one point (you never told her, and you thank yourself for that), your relationship with her quickly turned into something of a constant annoyance, a most cordial form of platonic hatred between two trolls who would deny ever having any positive relations between them. You still trust each other, surely, but in a way that you are both certain the other will betray you at any moment that appeals to them. Which is the correct way to approach it all, because you both know you would in fact do just that. Such are the lives of bluebloods. 

You hate how sometimes you miss cleaning her wounds for her after a particularly nasty FLARPing match, chiding her all the while both for engaging in something so dangerous and also for participating in an event so base and ignoble. She would scoff and say that you were stuffy and boring and invite you out, and you would decline again and again. You knew she had to feed her lusus, but it all just seemed so crass and inappropriate for someone of her position on the hemospectrum to have to do. Awful and selfish as it may sound to outsiders, and perhaps it may be, you sometimes also miss when you would watch her from afar, hiding up in her respiteblock (‘bedroom,’ you correct yourself, use more noble words, it's ‘bedroom’) for days at a time sitting squished down in the corner and doing everything in her power to ignore the horrendous screeching of her ravenous spidermother. You miss her needing you. 

(There is still a large scar where you carved a small part of your leg out to try and feed her lusus for her once, when she was exhausted and worn and miserable and you were just a child wanting to help her. You didn't then know your sacrifice wouldn't be enough. It never could have been.)

-

Explosions are uncommon noises in this part of the highblood neighborhoods. It's mostly screaming and occasionally thuds and, of course, the screeching from your dear neighbor’s lusus, but never outright explosions. It draws your attention just slightly, just for long enough that your hand falters before grabbing the next screwdriver you need to put in one of the bolts to the robot’s legs. You don't fully look outside, really, but you turn enough in your seat that through your indigo-tinted window you can see great clouds of dark, heavy smoke billowing in the air.

You're worried for Vriska. For the first few moments you wonder if one of her many gigantic defunct-and-or-currently-in-progress doomsday devices have gone off, but you dismiss that thought as soon as it arrives. As impressive as her mechanisms may look, you know that she does not have the type of skill and patience to legitimately create something of that sort. And she honestly doesn't seem the type to simply downscale to a plain bomb. Even still, the smoke appears to be coming from the general direction of her hive. You hope she's at least okay.

In all honesty, you're not entirely sure how long it takes for a tall, lanky silhouette to come right in (good gosh, have you really not gotten around to replacing that door yet?) You just know you can see it out of the corner of your eye.

“Heeeeeeeey neighbor!” Vriska slurs, leaning against your doorway and… a color catches your eye, more vibrant than the rest of her black and grey ensemble. Is that blood? It takes a lot of your internal strength to keep yourself looking down at your robot’s paneling and not sprinting halfway across the room to take a look at her and assess any potential damage she may have. Control yourself. That would be undignified, and this is likely another one of her tricks. Maybe she's running low on fresh corpses to feed her lusus this week; but that doesn't quite make sense, because you saw her bring in body after body just yesterday afternoon. Either way, she certainly does not actually want your help. She would likely get upset if you attempted to, in what you assume would be her words in such a situation, ‘act like she's a helpless wriggler.’ Actually no, she would use more profanity. You refuse to think about that any longer. 

She says something, and then attempts a laugh. It's a bit pathetic, and ends with what may have been a poorly stifled choking sound. You're not entirely sure.

“Say, do you think I could borrow a cup of spiders?”

Your mouth draws into a thin line. “…Why do you want spiders.” It's less a question and more a statement, somehow.

She seems undeterred by this, keeps going on and on as she stands in the doorway. She's rambling. There is a faint drizzling sound now, and had you not fine-tuned your hearing for combat purposes, you probably would not have noticed it. A sound like semi-melted jam splattering down onto glass. You're not sure why that's your immediate thought, to be honest, it's kind of weird— have you eaten recently?

You're fully turned around in your chair now and hunched over your work, but from the way her shoes pad against the floor and her voice gets gradually closer, you assume she's walking towards you. “You know what? FUCK spiders! …And fuck this cup, too.” You are about to ask what cup she is referring to before a shattering sounds comes from behind you. Ah. THAT cup. You will make sure Aurthour cleans that before either of you accidentally step on it.

“We've lived next to each other for all these SWEEPS, and we NEVER hang out!”

You pointedly decide to ignore your past as young trolls. This does not seem the situation to be having a conversation about that.

“I wanna be more NEIGHBORLY for a change! …Neigh-borly. Get it? Like a god damned horse noise.” She laughs again, and it's much louder than you would like. Actually, everything about Vriska is louder than you would like. She is simply very, obnoxiously loud.

Before you can make your train of thought go anywhere else, she's leaning up against your shoulder. You realize quite suddenly that yes, she is indeed bleeding. Profusely, in fact. Very, very much bleeding. From both her left shoulder and eye it seems. Oh wow that's a lot of blood. She's smearing it across your shoulder and face, and some is likely in your hair as well. You're not sure how to feel about this. 

A small exchange of semi-pleasantries occurs.

“What happened to your arm?”

She shrugs before visibly wincing at the gesture. “Huh? What arm?”

“The one that is missing from your body.”

She makes a dramatic motion with her one remaining hand, raining more small individual droplets of cerulean blood down onto you and the parts you're working with. “OH! Haha, THAT old thing? Nothing! It was- it was nothing, really. I just STUBBED it, is all.”

You lean farther down over your work table, trying to keep both her hair and blood as well as your own hair and sweat out of your eyes to little success. “You stubbed your arm.”

“Yeah! You know how it is. You get carried away with something, slip on some dice of something, then WHOOPS! You fall and stub a major appendage.”

She rests her elbow on a section of mostly-cleaned-off work table and leans her face into her palm. “It probably just needs a bit of patching up. Maybe cybernetically speaking… who knows! It's no big deal, really.” 

Hmm.

You place a screw between your teeth for safe keeping, careful not to bite hard enough to bend or cause it to be misshapen in any way. You reach over and grab a large metallic ring to fuse into the bottom of the robot’s torso later. 

“Actually,” Vriska shifts over more towards you, placing the unbloodied side of her face precariously close to your own, “why don't we forget about the arm for a second. Equius, we never really TALK, do we?”

A small, needy, and slightly lonely part of you acknowledges this as the truth. The rest of you refuses to acknowledge it at all.

“We live RIGHT NEXT to each other. We should hang out more!”

‘Yes!’ the same part screams in the back of your mind, ‘Yes! Bring it back to the way things used to be! Even just a little bit!’ Because even though you have an incredibly moirail who's everything you could ever want, somewhere deep down, you miss your childhood friend. You want to be friends again, but you know that can't happen. You don't even bother to try and pretend that it can, because pretend games are for those younger than you— with brighter eyes and brighter smiles than you.

You take the screw out from between your teeth and begin aligning it with the correct hole. “You are beneath me and we share very few interests.”

She bursts into a fit of laughter yet again, this time so loud and so close that it almost makes your hand clench far too tightly around the screwdriver clutched in your fist. Actually, you may have cracked the handle. Dammit. 

“What about your eye?”

She stands up, wobbling as she does so. It seems like she's trying to get up and go somewhere, but she actually just ends up sprawled across your shoulder again and resting her hand almost on your forearm. “Huh?”

“Your eye is also missing, and there is a great deal of blood coming from the socket.” And bits of glass. And other general pieces of shrapnel that had gotten trapped in her empty, blown-out eye socket and were peppering it as well as a good solid half of her scorched face. There were some white bits to it that appeared to be some sort of thick plastic? All in all, not very aesthetically pleasing to look at. It was her multi-pupiled eye, the one that gave her the fabled ‘vision eight-fold.’ 

“OH!” she exclaims, “Right. Would you believe I actually forgot about it?”

“I would not.” 

She seems unphased by your interjection yet again, “It's really AMAZING how quickly you get used to seeing out of just one eye.”

She nearly throws herself off of you, teetering precariously on her feet as she tries to regain her balance. “Anyway, yeah. I stubbed that too.”

“How does one stub an eye?”

She almost hits the back of her hand against your remaining full horn as she flails her arm. You're not entirely sure what sort of motion she's going for there, but you ARE entirely sure that you don't get it. She's still talking, but you're not listening. You can tell when she rambles, you know when to tune her out. 

You open and close your mouth a few times, careful to not let Vriska see as you think long and hard about what you might say. “…I heard some sort of noise from your hive.”

There's a pause. Did you interrupt her? Surely she was done talking by then.

“Huh? What explosion?”

You fidget as you watch the blood drip down from her horribly maimed stump of a left arm and down onto your concrete flooring. It's pooling quite badly, and you can assume there's a long trail from the doorway to your desk that you can't see from this angle. If she tries to walk anywhere, you're afraid she might actually slip into the puddle and dirty herself further. Not that she would likely care, even if she wasn't horribly injured at the moment. “Yes, it sounded like an explosion.”

“Oh yeah, that was, uh…” she bites her lip, unconsciously seeming to almost deflate, “just a loud and relatively uninteresting incident which caused me to stub my arm and eye like the STUPID FUCKING BUTTERFINGERS I am.”

“It's not important.” She's fully back to laying her face on the other, slightly messier side of her table now. You'd insist that she get her wounds away from that, as there are likely small bits of metal she could get in there and cause further pain and injury, but you're not sure if she'd listen to you if you bothered to say it. You're not even sure if she could, with the way her shoulders seem to keep dropping further and further and her slouch increases. “Hey, let's steer the subject away from my embarrassing stubbings and massive ongoing blood loss—” ah, so she is going to admit that and be aware, “— and talk about YOU.” She stabs a sharply clawed finger dangerously close to your face. “How are YOU doing, Equius?”

“I already told you. Moist.”

“Right! Man, you sure do sweat a lot!”

You exhale heavily through your nose. “Please do not bring that up.”

“Hey, you want me to fetch you a dry towel, neighbor?

You shake your head very gently and raise a hand towards her. “No, my butler will bring me a towel at one of his scheduled intervals.”

The sharp smell of rusting metal coming from her blood and, quite frankly, her entire person, is almost overwhelming at this point. You're no stranger to blood and gore, but this is proving to be bit much, especially for it to be in your own home. You're not entirely how long it's been since the LAST towel interval, but you surely hope there is one coming up soon. You're perspiring very heavily, as usual, but also perhaps you could clean up a small bit of all this blood. At least the large puddles of it surrounding your work table.

“Oh yeah,” Vriska says, and her voice is so filled with venom you feel like you might need an antidote, “I forgot about him. Must be nice, having a lusus that actually serves YOU instead of the other way around.”

You want to apologize, but you don't. Blue bloods never do. She turns on her heel slightly and rests her chin atop the already dented Newton’s cradle that sits on the edge of your desk. She's drooling blood and saliva all over it, occasionally dragging her chin through it unintentionally. She keeps rambling again and again, words slurring together and dripping out of her mouth without cause or purpose. She's talking, and talking, and talking, and…

She collapses. 

Blood splatters underneath your desk and, presumably, up against the wall as well. She's lying with your Newton’s cradle lying about a foot from her nose— she'd taken that down with her, of course, and it clattered to the floor with a metallic tang sort of sound.

You lean over in your chair and look down at her, trying to discern her state of consciousness. You're fairly certain that she's breathing, so at least that's something of a plus you suppose. She lays there silently curled into herself in a large pool of her own blood for a long while, and you're just about to get up and help her when she starts to move again.

She attempts to sit up, slipping several times in the blood pool and clearly struggling even worse without being able to have use of her left arm. Her already normally tangled hair is absolutely matted in cobalt. Actually, most of her form is covered in cobalt. The bleeding still hadn't stopped, but she's attempting not to let it impede her in any way. It's not working very well. 

She continues to sit, rocking back and forth in a dizzying manner as she pulls herself together. Her eyes are unfocused and seem to just be staring off into the void somewhere. Suddenly, her head snaps over to you, as is she'd forgotten where she was. Perhaps she had. “Whoops! Haha, sorry about that. Guess I got a bit light headed from the arm stubbing. It won't happen again, I promise. I'm a professional here, we both are!”

You turn around fully in your seat, “Are we.”

She skitters over to you, grinning like a madman and reaching out to you with the bloody remnants of her arm before realizing it's futile. “Yeah! I mean, just look at the incredible work ethic you have here! Always toiling away on your robot stuff.”

She finally manages to get to your feet, using the back of your chair as a leverage to lift herself up. She's somehow even more wobbly than she was before, which is perhaps more of a surprise to you than it should be. She limps herself over toward a corner of your room, clinging onto her stump of an arm for dear life, and you almost think she's leaving before you realize she's attempting to get to a pile of currently unused robot parts. She speaks again. She's sucking up to you, saying how amazing, how high-quality these parts are. Saying how there are so many you just have LAYING AROUND…

You know what she's getting at; you've known since she walked in the door. You have always had the keen ability to see her tactics for what they are. But you're not sure if you want to comply. You're not sure if you should. It would be so easy, to simply refuse to comply and just NOT help her. She's crass, and brutal, and she's just not the upstanding and proper blueblood you would want to have as a neighbor or even know at all. Even still, something clutches at your bloodpusher and tells you that you won't, you CAN’T leave her to bleed out and die. 

Aurthour enters the room, obviously startled by the quite frankly horrific amount of blood covering the room like paint. You raise a hand to him, signaling that everything is okay, and he calms somewhat. He hands you a towel, before nervously giving one to Vriska as well at her own request.

“Sorry about this mess, neighbor! Pretty fucked up of me actually, to barge into your hive with my various minor injuries and get my low class blood all over your nice robot studio.” It was rude, certainly, less the bloody mess and more the barging in portion. You open your mouth to say as much, but close it back as you watch what she attempts to do.

She's crouched down on the floor now, trying uselessly to clean up just a small portion of all the blood with the singular towel she'd been given. It's essentially just smearing it further and making an even worse mess, but oh well. It will get cleaned sooner or later, and you never even expected her to attempt cleaning up to begin with. “—So yeah! No pressure on that or anything.”

“On what?”

Vriska visibly tenses. She's losing blood faster than she can clean it, and you can tell that her arm is beginning to go weak and limp— even still, she keeps trying. On one push, she slips too hard and knocks her remaining hand as well as the blood-soaked towel against the pile of robotics, several panels and metal horns clattering to the floor. You want to frown. You do not. “On…nothing! I know you're a busy guy, and I'm obviously INCREDIBLY resourceful, and have absolute confidence in my ability to continue being an extremely effective person no matter WHAT handicaps she and I force each other to live with for some reason?”

“She?”

She freezes. Her hand clenches so tightly onto the towel there are almost certainly claw holes in it now, and there's a sickening squelch sound as freshly cleaned blood is wrung from the piece of cloth. “NOBODY!” she practically screeches, whipping her head around to you so quickly you think she might be preparing to kill you. Her eye doesn't focus entirely on you, seemingly not being able to focus on much of anything at all. “Pyrope is COMPLETELY aside from the point, and has nothing to do with you and me, and what GREAT neighbors we are!”

Pyrope. The name is familiar to him in a way, though mostly through second-hand talk. She infrequently chat roleplays with Nepeta, and, if memory serves, is also one of Vriska’s FLARPing partners.

Likely the one whom Vriska blinded.

Aah.

Vriska is pulling herself up from the floor, wearing the nastiest expression you've ever seen on her face. Every single one of her teeth are sharp and bared at you, remaining eye furious. Splattered in blood, even if it is her own, she's horribly imposing, and if you didn't know that her obvious blood loss would impede her in a fight, you would be incredibly afraid that she would attempt to kill you right then and there. But she's too weak now, and not only that, she NEEDS you, and admitting that to yourself gains you a dizzying feeling of power in your whole body that you weren't entirely prepared for. 

Vriska is absolutely screaming now, her throat has to be raw, you don't know what she's yelling about exactly, but it's something with Terezi, and with her own lusus, and just EVERYTHING it seems. Her screeching breakdown rant is interrupted by occasional bouts of piercing and increasingly panicked laughter. She goes, and goes, and goes more. And then you watch as she falls again, collapsing down for what would be the final time that day.

She lays there for only a few moments before you stand up. She's not getting up again any time soon. Bluebloods, and highblood in general, have an abundance of bloods and have the capabilities to heal wounds much faster than those with hotter hued blood, but that doesn't mean she's going to be able to make it through this by herself. Quite the contrary, actually; she will likely die without your assistance.

As gingerly as you can possibly manage, you scoop her up in your arms and place her limp body over your shoulder. She reeks of old blood, and you wrinkle your nose, but you don't even think about putting her down. Your first few steps are hesitant, watching carefully to avoid any too-large puddles of blood that could cause you to lose your footing or ruin your stockings, but you quickly pick up the pace as you make your way down the tall staircase, the floorboards creaking just slightly beneath your and Vriska’s combined weight.

Aurthour shoots you a look as you walk past, and you nod to make sure he knows everything is alright. This seems to ease him slightly. He gets so worried sometimes.

You arrive to another, much cleaner and somewhat more sterile robotics lab to little fanfare. You lay Vriska across the cold metal table and take a deep breath. You should probably complete as much work as you can while she's unconscious— there's really no telling what sorts of things she would try and do when she awoke.

You don't know what to think about all the happenings that lead to this particular situation, but you do indeed know what to do. Raising her up just a bit, you manage to peel the heavily bloodied jacket off her body, wincing when it in turn reveals more of the heavy mutation along her arm. Firstly, you take the jacket and put it on the opposite end of the table. Normally you would throw such a thing away, it's almost completely in tatters, but more than likely Vriska would want to keep it for whatever reason. Perhaps you'll have Aurthour wash it.

You take up a pair of scissors and cut away her shirt, seeing no need in potentially hurting or shifting her trying to pull it over her head normally. You likely would have ripped it anyways. You just hope she doesn't take too much offense to her state after she awakes. Though you knew this step of the process was inevitable and entirely necessary, you cannot help it when your face burns deep indigo and your eyes nearly stray down to her rumblespheres.

You finally look away and scan over her actual wounds. The damage to her arm was far more severe than what it had appeared from your brief glances at it earlier. Her arm was blown off, very obviously, but it was not in such a manner that everything came off clean. Bits of blue-tinted flesh hang by threads and fresh blood drips continuously, though not as much as it likely had at first. The wound is already making some attempt to begin the healing process by trying to pull itself together, but if you are to make her a prosthetic arm as she had apparently wanted you to, you would first have to begin by taking off her arm almost completely up to the shoulder joint. The rest of the flesh is just not salvageable in any manner of the word.

You look down at her, and try to pointedly ignore the increasingly pity-filled wrenches your heart has in reference to her current state. You know that were she not who she was and you who you were, you would pity her with everything you had. But you do know, and she would not return the sentiment; she would only use it for blackmail in future exchanges, a weakness of yours to be exploited when the time eventually came for her to do so. Perhaps to some it would seem cynical and upsetting, but on Alternia, things are different. When dealing with one Vriska Serket, a critical attitude is always advised, and all abuse is to be expected.


End file.
